Matthew Keane
Forum Replies Created
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Hi,
Have you looked at the Card Dance plug-in? If you have your 12 videos together in a precomp, Card Dance will let you chop it up into sections (say a 4×3 grid) and then animate each panel separately, with your final image as the back of the panels. You can either make them flip over in sequence, like a finely-tuned North Korean propaganda show, or you can use a gradient map to make more complex transitions. As well as the rotation of each panel, you can control the scale and position, so with a wiggle expression, you should be able to make it look like a heaving crowd.
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Hi,
I think – only having listened to the tutorial once while I was doing something else – that it uses some nifty expressions to fix a point in 3D space. In the tutorial, the point is the base of the road signs, but it could just as well be an 3D null that you use to position an emitter. So it should work. Failing that, you might have to look at a real 3D tracker like the CameraTracker plugin from the Foundry.
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Hi,
I don’t know if you have access to any 3rd party plugins, but I recently made needed to make a DNA animation and used Trapcode Form, which will give you a 3D element that you can fly a camera around or through. There are a few tutorials out there if you search around a bit. You could use a custom particle to show a random letter and, by using gradient maps, you can control their size, position and opacity. In the animation I made, the client wanted to see the connections form between the 2 spirals – not sure if that has any scientific basis, but it looks good!
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Hi,
Just a thought, before you break out the particle systems and start tweaking. If there’s one thing that really looks like steam coming off the top of a hot mug of coffee, it’s the real thing, and the setup is not that hard (and you can drink it afterwards!). If you shoot a real mug of coffee against a black backdrop, with just enough light to highlight the wisps of steam, you can overlay the steam footage on the mug you already shot. Admittedly, it’s not as flexible as particle systems – if you want the wisps of steam to form the coffee company logo, you’re pretty much out of luck if you’re shooting the real thing! – but sometimes steam, smoke, etc is simpler to shoot than to recreate.
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Wow, yeah, so forget my import-and-place-the-dots idea!
But, assuming that the logo designer probably used some kind of plug-in to wrap the image into 3D, they probably have a flat, unwrapped, version somewhere that you could import into CC-Sphere, wrap around a sphere and take for a spin.
Or, if you really wanted to spend some time, and client money, on it, I guess you could recreate it using Form and some funky gradient maps to control the size of the dots.
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Without seeing the logo, it’s hard to say exactly what will work. My first thoughts were, ermm, CC Sphere and then Trapcode Form, if you have the plug-in and want a lot of dots to make up your sphere.
If the logo is simpler, with the 3D aspect suggested by dots of different sizes, you might be able to recreate it by importing the elements separately, and then placing them in z-space, which might allow a slight camera move to give the impression of a 3D sphere, but that’s going to be fiddly to set up and not entirely convincing (you’re not going to be able to orbit all the way around it).
If you have CS5, then the Freeform plugin, and a gradient map, would allow you to deform a flat image into something a bit more spherical, which would react to lights.
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I haven’t tried it, but there’s another script on that site that looks to do something similar but is also capable of replacing the text for certain layers with text from a spreadsheet, which might really speed things up.
https://aescripts.com/compsfromspreadsheet/
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If you don’t want to spring for Automatic Duck – and if you don’t need it’s extra features, like carrying over of effects and transitions – there are some scripts which allow you to import an XML from FCP to AE. If you’re just using FCP to do a rough edit and will be doing all your effects in AE, it works pretty well (with the exception that, in my experience, clips retimed in FCP don’t always import as expected).
Don’t have a link handy, but if you search around for ‘FCP AE XML script’ you should find something that will help you out.
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Hi,
If I recall, mid-grey pixels should result in no change, while white and black will give the maximum displacement in opposite directions. So, for a horizontal displacement, black (0) would give the maximum shift to the left, and white (255) the maximum shift to the right, while any mid-grey (127) pixels won’t create any displacement.
To be honest though, I can never remember for certain whether it’s white or black which gives the negative displacement, so you should probably go look this up!